Mary Jo (Brooke Adams), the protagonist of writer-director Michael Roemer’s sore-to-the-touch Vengeance is Mine (1984), just goes by Jo now. Cleaving half her name seems less a way to rend an old version of herself and more a means to generate distance from an upbringing whose foundational pains still haunt her everyday life. She was adopted, and her mother (Roseanna Cox), so cold and distant in the few scenes we’re around her that she might as well be suspended in permafrost, hasn’t tried to hide that she much prefers Jo’s adopted sister, Franny (Audrey Matson). (We’ll learn later that when Jo was growing up, her mom likened her to the devil, and wasn’t kidding.)
No wonder that while flying into her hometown, a dismal New England suburb called Dover, at the start of Vengeance is Mine, Jo gets so drunk onboard that one of the first things she does upon arriving at the airport is run into a door. Jo is visiting because she’s planning on moving to Seattle — a place repeatedly positioned as a sort of paradise able to absolve all of one’s problems — to continue her career as a TV journalist, and doesn’t know the next time she’ll be able to so easily come down. Her visit, though, seems to be appreciated by no one besides Franny, who’s good-hearted but vexingly apologetic about the mother from whose cruelties she’s been shielded, and a guy in a restaurant who’s alluded to have gotten Jo pregnant in high school. Dad is as hurtfully indifferent as ever. And when Jo tries making peace with her mom early in the film, trying to excuse the latter’s hardness as a forgivable example of some adoptions just not working out, her mother manipulatively pretends to not hear. “I’m kind of tired, Mary Jo,” she’ll offer, her eyes down and expression flat.
Roemer didn’t make very many movies. His first feature-length film, the similarly aching Nothing But a Man, was released in 1964, and succeeded by less than a handful of cinematic projects through 1993. Vengeance is Mine wasn’t released to much fanfare: it was essentially dumped onto PBS, where few saw it under the on-the-nose title Haunted. But thanks to some high-profile screenings at New York’s Film Forum, it has, in recent years, been rightly reclaimed as something close to a masterpiece.
Trish Van Devere and Brooke Adams in Vengeance is Mine.
Few movies I’ve seen capture, with Vengeance is Mine’s same understated, true-to-life vividness, the way abusive patterns from childhood can manifest in new contexts in adulthood, and how formative traumas can still be psychologically and emotionally omnipresent in one’s life long after initially materializing. The movie’s predilection for closeup and shaky camerawork might call to mind the nowhere-to-hide naturalism of John Cassavetes, though Roemer’s presentation has a touch more gloss. Vengeance is Mine is more like a melodramatic TV serial subverting the form by never cheapening the sometimes spine-chilling dramas some of its characters endure.
Vengeance is Mine spends a little time with Jo and her family, where the toxic dynamics that festered in the home for years are clear-cut in the matter of a few scenes. It’ll briefly move into a sneakily terrifying interlude between Jo and her emotionally and physically abusive husband Steve (Mark Arnott), who stalks his wife to Dover so that he can terrorize her, aggravated about the divorce she’s rigid in wanting. (It’s in these stretches with Steve that Roemer harrowingly first introduces how monstrous hair-cutting and control via car are when brandished by an abuser.)
Vengeance is Mine is most taken up by a domestic disturbance Jo accidentally falls into. She’s acquainted one evening with Jackie (Ari Meyers), a friendly little girl who lives next door, and is invited over for company. Jackie lives with her mother, Donna (Trish Van Devere), and tonight is suggested to be among many recently where Donna has disappeared without a trace. Donna does eventually show up; we’ll come to learn that Jo ought to have been more alarmed than she seems to be by how Donna happens upon her daughter with an adult stranger and neither reacts nor asks who Jo is.
Jo gets involved with the family anyway, mostly to escape her own. But her sympathetic ear to Donna’s carping over her impending divorce from her journalist husband Tom (Jon DeVris) starts to close the more it becomes plain that her emotional instability regularly results in her lashing out at Jackie. In the first few scenes of Jo acting as a kind of passive, quiet bystander to a tricky-to-navigate situation, she is redolent of a ghost, watching over a younger version of herself helpless to a scarily volatile mother.
Brooke Adams in Vengeance is Mine.
Jo will get more hands-on. She’s protective of a little girl vulnerable to a mother well aware her demons are hurting her daughter but refuses therapy. Jo will get to a point where she’s scolding Tom for not doing enough to intervene. Knowing how much her childhood hurt still persists, she’s keenly aware of how Jackie must feel — how she might emotionally evolve if someone doesn’t stand up for her, recognize her suffering.
It would be easy, Wesley Morris observed in his review of the movie, to place these characters in narrow, familiar moral confines — to make Donna in particular a blank-from-hell type as seen in movies like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Single White Female (1992) so that we could more easily villainize her. But Roemer doesn’t resort to easy condemnation or evince satisfaction at seeing Donna, a woman defeated by her lack of success as an artist and disinterest from a husband even before her unsteadiness became an unignorable problem, meet the consequences of her actions. (“I feel like I’m dead,” she concludes late in the film.) Roemer appears to look at Jo’s de-facto saviorism a little askance, too, wondering if she’s wading in a little further than appropriate for someone who wasn’t long ago a stranger. Is there an unconscious need to be the reliable adult figure she herself never had growing up? Adams and Van Devere both give tour-de-force performances; their bruised work should have taken them to new echelons of reverence had the movie been more widely seen, engaged with.
Everyone in Vengeance is Mine deals with the circumstances they’ve been either dealt or created for themselves as best as they know how, which is to say messily, unpredictably. Roemer evocatively captures a lifetime of hurt and the fresh, real-time pains that will build on them in the course of the movie. It would feel more like a miracle that the movie can conclude with some optimism and not feel contrived if Vengeance is Mine so often didn’t feel like one itself.
Peterson Reviews 